Reuse comes to pass in the app world

There are plenty of mobile apps out there — why can't some of them be repurposed, versus writing new ones from scratch over and over again?

Image: Joe McKendrick/ZDNet

That's the gist of a new story from Todd R Weiss, which has interesting echoes of the service-orientation movement. That is, rather than reinvent the wheel each time a service needs to be deployed, tap into the repository of existing services, and reuse them in other functions or processes.

On a different scale, mobile apps can also get reused for different purposes. Weiss cited the example of Justin Miller, co-founder of WedPics.com, who reported that he has received a lot of corporate and individual interest in adapting the app for non-wedding purposes.

IBM, for one, thought the app, which collects smartphone photos from wedding guests into an online account, would be useful at its conferences. The challenge, Miller said, is adding marketing and scaling to promote the app deeper into the enterprise market.

SOA calls for more expansive thinking early on in development projects, with consideration of how a service can and will be shared. Perhaps today's generation of app developers can adopt this thinking as well.